Tom Steyer, the billionaire political activist, and Henry Cisneros, former HUD Secretary, will talk to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on April 2nd about the economic impact of climate change on businesses in California and worldwide. Already the drought in California, along with other shifting weather patterns around the planet, are having an effect on business. Steyer and Cisneros will discuss a new report on how climate change can be expected to affect California’s economy in the future.
San Francisco-based Steyer spent $57m of his own money in an attempt to influence the 2014 mid-term elections in the area of climate change – three of the seven candidates he backed were elected. He is one of the co-founders, along with former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg of Risky Business, a non-partisan organization that looks at the likely effects of climate change on business. Steyer founded Farallon Capital Management in 1986 – it now manages $20 bn in funds. Along with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet he has pledged to give away half his wealth to charity, and has funded the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford University. Steyer graduated from Yale with a degree in economics and political science.
Henry Cisneros was mayor of San Antonio, Texas, from 1981 to 1989 and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1997. Since leaving politics he founded and now runs CityView, an urban institutional investment firm that backs affordable housing development and has done more than $2 billion in transactions. Cisneros, who has spoken and written extensively about urban development and the future of cities, has degrees from Texas A&M and Harvard.